Day: April 11, 2006

One of the top ten things Guy Kawaski learned during his first 100 days of blogging is that I’m clueless:My favorite lesson from Guy’s first 100 days of blogging: “A tiny amount of people who read my blog are clueless. My favorites are the ones who complain about four things: the top-ten format…”

Update: Background. As I said when I posted that, I’m a fan of Guy Kawaski (and what person who, like me, bought a Mac in 1984 would not be). I’ve gotten used to his list thing and he has evolved it so that he actually speaks with a human-voice now in the context of those lists. At first, they were just lists. But, as I’ve said so many times in the past five years, there are no rules in blogging. If you want to blog in lists, bullet points, or hieroglyphics, have at it. I may scratch my head at someone’s style, but I hope I’m not complaining. And if I’m complaining, it at least means what someone has to say matters enough to complain about.

The VIP unvitation — or how not to kick-off your e-mail marketing conference marketing:Paul Conley was emailed a “VIP invitation” to an upcoming “e-mail marketing summit” — with the host offering to pay the “cost of (his) airfare, hotel accommodations and conference registration.” A few hours later, Paul was e-mailed a VIP dis-invite — Oops, Paul, we didn’t really mean that part about the airfair, hotel, and registration thing being on us…however, we’d still like you to come for the low, low registration price of $2,500.

And these are e-mail marketing experts putting on this conference? Sounds to me they should be attending one.

What Nick Bradbury said:“It is scary for small developers who see bigger players like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Yahoo getting into their space – especially when some of those bigger players have a track record of “embrace and extend” (followed by “destroy”) – and I fully expect Microsoft to further RSS-enable many of their applications. For some users, these applications will provide enough functionality to make third-party RSS aggregators unnecessary. At the same time, though, it will also broaden the audience for RSS, providing a larger base of customers for syndication companies that stay on their toes and remain innovative.”

“Pluck employees then vet and review the blogs before pulling together a feed of the best posts for publication partners. The newspapers then put the posts they want into different sections of their online sites. The goal is for newspapers to sell ads in these sections. Pluck would then take a cut of those sales and give a portion to the best performing bloggers.”

Observation: If this is sounding familiar, you may be having some Web 1.0 deja-vu about Screaming Media, “that (was) basically a content syndicate — an online update on the kind of service that newspaper syndicates have long provided: aggregating content from content creators and redistributing it to various content publishers where it appears. Screaming Media (collected) fees from the content republisher and (paid) the original content providers.”

Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)